Dhole – An Imperil Dog (Asiatic Wild Dog)

The dhole was first observed by an explorer, Pesteref. He declared dhole as a pack hunter and having similarities of a golden jackal. The scientific name of dhole is Cuon alpinus given by Peter Pallas in 1811. The dhole is found in Central, South, and Southeast Asia. Historically, the native place of dholes is Bangladesh, Bhutan, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Thailand. These are not found in desert areas.

Dhole’s Habitat and Diet

The Dhole habitat is in a wide variety of vegetation types. These are found in dense forests, steppes, and alpine places, scrub, Western and Eastern Ghats in Northeast India. These are also found in Chitwan National Park and Kanchenjunga Conservation Area.

The researchers analysed the diet of dholes during their surveys. Dholes are carnivorous animals and they hunt in morning hours and at night in the presence of moonlight. Country wise diet choice of Dhole is given below.

Country

Diet

India

Deer, wild goats, wild pigs and buffalo

Southeast Asia

Gaur, deer and banteng

Siberia

wild sheep, deer and reindeer

In other countries

Bugs, lizards, berries and rabbits

San Diego Zoo Safari Park

Meat, bones, and thawed rabbits once a week

Behaviour

As mentioned earlier, the dholes hunt in the morning hours and at night under moonlit. Dholes are not fast as jackals and foxes in hunting. They chase their pray for many hours and then eat. They chase only 500m and they run at a pace of 30mph to grab a prey. Group of dholes hunt together, if they found an animal one will catch its nose and remaining will pull other parts of the victim’s body.

They usually eat heart, liver, lungs, and intestines of targeted animals and leave stomach and rumen parts. They let puppies to eat first when they kill prey.

Lifestyle and Lifecycle

The lifestyle of dholes is social in nature. They live in a pack of 5-12 dholes in each group. They greet at one another by wagging their tails. They work together to feed and care for itself. They live in burrows with different entrances. They share, hunt their prey together by forming large pack of 30 animals and again subdivided into smaller packs.

These dholes have four kinds of dens.

Simple earth dens (only one entrance)

Complex earth dens (more than one entrance)

Simple Cavernous dens (between rocks)

Interconnected dens ( located under dense scrub or banks of rivers)

They use high-pitched screams to find enough prey to eat. It uses their sense of smell to grab prey. They also chase prey into water to slow down prey movement and it makes them easy to eat.

Dominant dholes are allowed to breed and rest of all the dholes are engaged in taking care of nursing mother and pups.

Dhole Predators

Bengal Tigers

Leopards

Pythons

Saltwater crocodiles

Mugger crocodiles

Humans

Breeding and Lifespan

Usually Dhole breeds in the months of November and December, but dholes in Moscow Zoo breed in the month of February.The male spends two weeks courting the female and two weeks to mate with female Dhole. The gestation period goes around 60 -63 days and give birth to 5 to 12 pups.At 1 year, a pup will be grown fully and sexually mature about three years old.